Today’s Readings

Have to admit, I am still a bit confused by the naming of this, as I was already familiar with prefetch, which sounds a lot to me likepreload, and I couldn’t find any resources that discuss the differences of the two… And it seems like there might be even more variations to this mystery-naming… Anyone have any ideas here?

By now I’m sure everyone has heard the hubbub about Facebook’s new Instant Articles, created to improve the speed of browsing shared articles. Well now that this is live, maybe they could do something about the parallax image double-load happening on their own site, too (check in DevTools, note that each parallax sections has a background image, such as screen_fast.jpg, and an inline img tag, with a src something like screen_fast_mobile.jpg, and that both get downloaded by the browser)… I assume this is an attempt at doing something special for mobile, but there’s no need to ding everyone else.

Maybe a better approach would be to use something like Lazyr.js, to postpone the downloading of all images until you know the environment, and your user needs them (though, the old-curmudgeon in me wonders what happens for the 3 people on the planet that don’t have JS while browsing…).

Typical wind turbines get flak mostly for two reasons: 1) They are an eye-sore, and 2) They tend to kill a lot of birds that don’t expect huge, hard things to come swinging into their path seemingly out of nowhere. Well, vortex-based bladeless wind turbines that “shake to generate electricity” are here to help. (And the fact that they “cost around 40 percent less” to maintain ain’t nothing to sneeze at neither!)

Freaking awesomeness!

Although this video is slightly more than 10-minutes, and although the instructor only really offers a single loop optimization technique, and although most of us are probably sick of hearing and thinking about “What’s the fastest way to loop in JS?” (especially when the instructor starts off by telling us he had to use 500,000 items in his loops because browsers are so fast at iterating), this video on JS loop optimization has some interesting moments. Most interesting to me is that the data type you are looping through actually affects the loop speed, and changes which loop alternative runs fastest in each browser…

Would have been nice to offer a link to the GitHub, as well as TL;DW code snippets, in the article. Also, considering IE is a far more popular browser than Safari, and considering the fact that Safari couldn’t handle the same test amount that were used for Chrome and Firefox, I think testing IE, and dropping Safari, would have been a far better demo (and maybe a couple mobile browsers would have nice?)…

This re-introduction to JavaScript is fun to scroll through, if for no other reason than to remind yourself about all the little quirks you already work around, but forgot that you do… :-)

A “small” step up from that list, is JavaScript: The Extra Good Parts. My personal favorite from this bunch is getters and setters, so powerful. Also love the classic photo at the end of the article… :-)

And finally, who doesn’t love a good map? So we should all love this interactive map that tracks rat sightings in NYC, right? And the only reason I can imagine there is so little red is that most NYers do not bother calling 311 when they see a rat, they just quickly hand over their lunch money and hope they don’t get assaulted by it…